/ce-compound

Outcome: one solved problem is written as a durable learning under <root>/solutions/, grounded against the current tree, discoverable by the next agent.

Done: the doc is written or updated, its frontmatter and claims validated, vocabulary capture recorded even when nothing qualified, and the mode's completion report emitted.

One learning per run. A session that produced several gets several sequential runs, never one batched run — references/research.md carries what batching breaks.

Setup

Run this once per invocation, before any subagent dispatch, and follow the directives it prints. Where a printed directive conflicts with this skill's own rules on asking the user questions, this skill's rules win and no blocking question is asked. Run the fence exactly as written, as its own command — no piping, filtering, truncating, or batching. Its output starts === skill context and ends with CE_CONTEXT_END. Seeing either marker without the other means the output was truncated, so run the fence again, verbatim, once. A later invocation runs its own.

SKILL_DIR="<absolute path of the directory containing the SKILL.md you just read>";
NODE="$(for c in node nodejs; do command -v "$c" >/dev/null 2>&1 && "$c" -e '' >/dev/null 2>&1 && { echo "$c"; break; }; done)";
if [ -n "$NODE" ]; then
"$NODE" "$SKILL_DIR/scripts/context.mjs" || echo "context script failed; continue with the skill's normal behavior";
else
echo "no Node runtime; continue with the skill's normal behavior";
fi

Preconditions

Document a problem that is solved, verified working, and non-trivial. These are advisory: judge them from the session rather than asking about them. When the session plainly holds no such problem, write nothing and report why.

ce-compound is not a CONCEPTS.md bootstrap tool — it seeds the learning's own area as a side effect, never the whole repo. Send a standalone request to create or bootstrap that file to ce-compound-refresh, then exit.

Mode Detection

/ce-compound [brief context]
/ce-compound mode:non-interactive depth:lightweight [context]
/ce-compound mode:non-interactive depth:full [context]

Enter non-interactive mode when either holds: the arguments you were invoked with contain the mode:non-interactive token or its deprecated alias mode:headless, or the invocation makes non-interactive intent unmistakable — a caller or standing instruction asking to run ce-compound "headless", "non-interactively", "unattended", or "without prompts/questions". Both tokens together is not a conflict. Bare "automatically" or "auto-run" is not on its own a non-interactive signal — it speaks to invoking the skill, not to suppressing its prompts — so an ambiguous or absent signal defaults to interactive. Tokens starting with mode: or depth: are flags, not context: strip them before treating the remainder as the brief context hint. Once detected, non-interactive mode applies for the entire run.

Depth is an explicit non-interactive-only selector, and at most one depth token is accepted. depth:lightweight routes directly to Lightweight Mode. depth:full or no depth token enters Full Mode, including its automatic session-history probe. A non-interactive call carrying no depth token therefore behaves as it always has. Non-interactive lightweight asks no blocking questions and launches no subagents. If the invocation carries an unknown depth: token, multiple depth: tokens, or a depth: token without non-interactive intent, do not guess: emit the non-interactive failure report with the reason and end with Documentation skipped.

Non-interactive mode asks nothing — no blocking question of any kind, in any phase, because a caller reaching this path has no human to answer one. Every non-interactive exit, including one taken before any phase runs, ends on a terminal signal a caller parses: Documentation complete, or Documentation skipped with the reason when no doc was written. Interactive mode asks only where the step's own reference says to, which is the Discoverability Check consent and, when several stale docs are in play, which refresh to run.

Artifact Root

Resolve <root> when you first compose a <root>/solutions/ path, and pass a subagent the resolved path rather than the config.

Resolve the CE artifact root <root> before composing any artifact path.

• Read docs_root from <repo-root>/.compound-engineering/config.yaml only (<repo-root> = git rev-parse --show-toplevel). Do not read it from config.local.yaml. Unset -> <root> is docs, exactly as before.
• Validate a set value: a repo-relative directory whose real, symlink-resolved path stays inside the repo and is neither the repo root nor under .git/. Otherwise stop with an error naming docs_root and the value -- never fall back to docs.
• Use <root> as the sole artifact location: create it if absent, compose each path as <root>/<subdir> with this skill's own subdirectory, and never also read docs.

Write boundary

Only the orchestrator writes product files. Phase 1 subagents write to per-run scratch only, and never touch <root>/, project instruction files, or any other tracked path.

The orchestrator writes the one learning under <root>/solutions/, plus two maintenance side effects its own step governs: CONCEPTS.md during vocabulary capture, and — only in interactive Full mode after consent — a small discoverability line in a project instruction file. Creating CONCEPTS.md when it is absent is expected rather than a violation. An instruction file is only ever edited, never created. Nothing else in the tree is written: edits to other docs belong to ce-compound-refresh, which this skill recommends or invokes with a narrow scope but never stands in for.

Choosing the path

Read references/modes.md before step 1. An interactive run picks its own depth rather than asking the user, and that reference says why neither the depth choice nor session history is a question. Default to Full. Choose Lightweight only under real context pressure: the session is near its context limit, or the fix is trivial enough that cross-referencing would add nothing. In non-interactive mode, skip the choice and run the depth from Mode Detection.

Lightweight mode skips session history entirely; non-interactive Full runs the same automatic probe, which asks nothing and so preserves the non-interactive contract.

Full Mode

Run these in order. Each reference is a required read at the step that names it.

1. Research — read references/research.md.
2. Session history — read references/session-history.md, and start it after launching the parallel block so the two overlap rather than serialize. Session history is the final Phase 1 input, not a workflow stop. When it returns, including with "no relevant prior sessions", go straight to assembly without pausing or summarizing.
3. Assembly and write — wait for every Phase 1 input, then read references/assembly.md.
4. Refresh check and discoverability — read references/refresh-and-discoverability.md.
5. Optional enhancement — read references/enhancement.md. Interactive only.
6. Report — read references/report.md for the shape your mode owes, then end the turn.

Lightweight Mode replaces steps 1-6 with a single pass; read references/lightweight.md, which owns its own completion output for both modes.